Abbott to pay $385 million over infant formula claims from Sturgis and Casa Grande

Abbott Laboratories has agreed to pay $384,999,040 to resolve United States and state claims that it caused government programmes to buy powdered infant formula and nutritional products that did not meet legal and contractual standards. The Justice Department announced the civil settlement on Monday. Of the total, $348,700,868 goes to the federal government and $36,298,172 to state Medicaid and WIC programmes.

The period covered is 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2022. The plants named are in Sturgis, Michigan, once the largest infant-formula factory in the country, and Casa Grande, Arizona. On 13 November 2025 the United States filed a complaint in intervention saying Abbott caused programmes to purchase Sturgis powder even though the product failed statutory, regulatory and contractual requirements. The department's language on Monday said the manufacturing practices put the products at an unacceptable risk of microorganism contamination and affected reliability, quality and safety.

The 2022 shortage is the public memory

Problems at Sturgis produced a recall of powdered brands including Similac and a shutdown that emptied American shelves in 2022. Supply was already tight after pandemic stockpiling. The Biden administration eased import rules, flew formula in from Europe and used emergency powers to push domestic output. Parents remember the empty aisle. The settlement is the later legal bill for the same plant.

Three former Abbott employees who filed the whistleblower case, Scott Millard, Kristine Cooper and Loren Cooper, will receive $69 million from the federal share. The qui tam suit sits in the Western District of Michigan.

Abbott said the settlement is not an admission of fault or liability. The company said government tests of unopened product taken from the homes of infants under investigation at the time of the 2022 recall were negative for Cronobacter sakazakii, and that no unopened, distributed Abbott infant formula has ever tested positive for that bacterium. The Justice Department under President Trump closed the criminal investigation.

Who paid for the formula that failed the spec

WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, is funded and regulated by the Department of Agriculture. It is the largest buyer of infant formula in the United States. When a plant that supplies WIC goes down, the shortage is not evenly spread. It hits the households that cannot switch to an imported premium brand at retail. The False Claims Act theory is that those programmes paid for powder that was not the product the contracts described.

Casa Grande sits in the same settlement as Sturgis. That widens the file beyond one Michigan factory. The dollar figure, $385 million in round numbers, is large enough to be a headline and small enough, against Abbott's annual sales, to be a cost of closing a case.

What the settlement does not reopen

Criminal exposure is closed. Civil exposure for the listed years is closed if the company pays. Families who lost children in 2022 are not parties to this cheque. The operational question left is whether Sturgis and Casa Grande now run to a standard that a future inspector will accept without another recall. The department's statement said the food supply is nonnegotiable. The contract language in WIC tenders will be the place that sentence is tested, not the press release.